Maimonides' rule is named after the 12th-century rabbinic scholar

Maimonides Moses ben Maimon (1138–1204), commonly known as Maimonides (, ) and also referred to by the Hebrew acronym Rambam (), was a Sephardic rabbi and Jewish philosophy, philosopher who became one of the most prolific and influential Torah schola ...

, who identified a correlation between class size and students' achievements. Today this rule is widely used in educational research to evaluate the effect of class size on students' test scores. Maimonides' rule states that a class size may rise to an upper limit of 40 students. Once this quota is reached the class is cut in half, so instead of one class with forty-one students there are now two classes: one with twenty students and one with twenty-one students.

Joshua Angrist Joshua David Angrist (; born September 18, 1960) is an Israeli American economist and Ford Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Angrist, together with Guido Imbens, was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Eco ...

and Victor Lavy (1999) have used "the nonlinear relationship between the local number of students and the class size predicted by Maimonides' rule to estimate the impact of class size on student performance, and evaluate the effect of being just below the number of students for whom an additional teacher would be brought up, and of being just above this number." Their results have shown highly irregular patterns in class size that are precisely mirrored in student achievement. They have found that a reduction in predicted class size of ten students is associated with a 0.25

standard deviation In statistics, the standard deviation is a measure of the amount of variation of the values of a variable about its Expected value, mean. A low standard Deviation (statistics), deviation indicates that the values tend to be close to the mean ( ...

increase in fifth-graders' test scores.Understanding poverty p.278
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References

Rules Educational psychology

Rule Rule or ruling may refer to: Human activity * The exercise of political or personal control by someone with authority or power * Business rule, a rule pertaining to the structure or behavior internal to a business * School rule, a rule th ...

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